I have been waited for weeks until the newly ordered Raspberry Pi 4 was delivered. I also ordered an aluminum case to make it looks cooler. It’s not hard to imagine how disapointted when I found there seemed no way to boot the new toy.

When I switched on the power, the red LED lights to indicate power is supplied, the fan also works. But the green LED only flashed for a while and then no response at all. No vedio output, even the leds on my connected keyboard and mouse did not light at all.

There are several steps to solve the problem. First I checked the offical website, where they announced that because of EEPROM corruption, some new raspberry pi 4 may not be able to boot, and gave the following solution to recover the EEPROM.

1. Try to recover the EEPROM

If your Raspberry Pi 4 will not boot, it is possible that the SPI EEPROM has become corrupted.

  • To check, remove the SD card, disconnect the device from power, then reconnect it. If the green LED does not flash, you will need to reprogram the EEPROM:
  • Download the bootloader
    Extract it to an empty FAT-formatted SD card and insert it into your Raspberry Pi 4
    Connect the power and wait for the green LED to flash quickly.
  • Disconnect the device from power, replace the SD card with your booted one, connect the device back to see if it works.

2. Upgrade your Raspbian image

If the first step didnot solve yor problem, perhaps your Raspbian image is out of date and do not support Raspberry Pi 4. You need to:

  • Download the latest image from Official Website.It is recommanded to use the official Raspbian so as to make sure your Pi4 works.
  • Unzip the image file and write it into your SD card. under OSX or Linux you can use dd order, under windows you may find rufus is a usefull tool.
  • To enable SSH function, you can add a file with name “SSH” (with no suffix like .txt). This will enable the Pi SSH function headlessly.
  • If there is still no response. Try next step.

3. Remove any unecessary Peripheral

As Raspberry Pi 4 cosumes more power than its predecessors, if your power adapter cannot supply more current, it may also cause boot failure.

  • In this case you may need to remove all unecessay peripheral like monitor, keyboard and mouse, and only leave power supply and ethernet connection.
  • You need another computer as well as the login previlige of yoru LAN router to search for Pi’s IP address.
  • under OSX or Linux you can try ssh in terminal. under windows you may need to enable WSL or use ssh tools like putty.
  • If you can find Pi 4 on your local network and connect it with user name “pi“ and default password “raspberry“. It means that Pi4 works, and you need to check your power adapter and hdmi adapter.